The war had been dragging for more than three whole months, but this was not simply because Kain wished to take it slow. Well, he did wish to take it slowly, but there were other reasons for the snail’s pace as well. A rush would cost Darksol greatly, as the flora and fauna of Arcfira were simply too hostile for any sort of quick victory to happen. Likewise, Arcfira was a massive continent, and unlike its Earth analog, this version was literally one massive super jungle.

If this were the normal, Earth version, perhaps the war would have been easier, but anyone who has engaged in jungle fighting will tell you that the natives always have the advantage in such a place. They know the lay of the land, they have resistance to native diseases and dangers, they know how to use the land to their advantage, and they know how to make sure that those that enter never leave.

As such, the first order of business for Darksol was not, in fact, to march its armies into certain defeat, but instead to create as much of a foothold as could be made. That was why so many swarms of Fel Bats had essentially been used as kamikaze bombers. That was why Kain had been using Agent Orange. That was why the war was going so slowly.

And, as far as Kain was concerned, the gradual destruction of the pristine jungles was going wonderfully. While Agent Orange was now off the table, incendiary bombing runs followed by ones carrying the new ‘land corrupting goo’ resulted in the nearby jungle becoming pock-marked with gradually growing holes where the native life had to fight a desperate battle to even continue existing. As you might imagine, mixing Napalm with White Phosphorus and Thermite created a nasty compound commonly referred to as ‘Composite Napalm’, and that stuff did hellish damage to everything it touched.

And, wherever the flames burned away enough foliage, the second strike would make sure that the enchanted jungle would not easily reclaim that which it had lost. If Agent Orange was pure evil, this new corrupting concoction was even worse. After all, Agent Orange merely killed or tortured everything it touched, either quickly or slowly, but this did something arguably worse. Dubbed ‘Black Mass’ by the chuuni nerds that made it, it didn’t merely kill or wound that which was touched by it.

As stated in the previous chapter, Black Mass was designed to turn the land it tainted into a miniature version of the Gallows Woods. While that place had nearly been erased by the rapid urban sprawl of Necrograd, anyone with a decent memory would remember how nasty that place once was. Simply setting foot in there could lead to madness or suicide as hallucinations of all types and intensities assaulted the senses and a dark, corrupting force turned even those of pure and noble hearts into beings bound to Darksol’s will.

Now there were little patches of this nightmarish realm in edges of Arcfira’s jungles, and these patches were slowly growing both in number and size. Like an infection, these twisted splotches of corruption would slowly encroach on the jungle around them, spreading with tendrils of influence rather than a full increase in area. And, once the tendrils of influence from these corrupted areas began to link up, the taint would spread even faster than before.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

In only a matter of under two months, Darksol had regained all of the territory it had lost to the Elven Tribes during the first four weeks of the war. Likewise, Darksol had secured a substantial amount of territory from their foe due to these endless bombing runs. While the Arcfiran Confederated Tribes once had all of Arcfira for themselves (save for a small bit near where Morocco would be which was in Dwarven hands), the land that they had seized from the shattered Arbianan Sultanate was now slowly being taken back.

Small outposts were being established along the coast, and from there more bombing runs were being launched. By the end of the fifth month, the impossible had been achieved, and the entire coastline that ran across the sea was under Darksol’s control. Of course, this was not to say that the Elves and the Plantoid masters had been pushed back very far. In all actuality, the distance between the shoreline and where the Elves’ current borders lay was only about a ten or eleven mile stretch at most, but the fact that the insanely rapid growth of the vegetation had been slowed to a crawl was the impossible feat, not anything else.

That said, the jungle was adapting to the bombing runs rather quickly, and this meant that the intensity had to be increased. That meant that more Fel Bats had to be sent to die glorious deaths for their masters, and while those chaff creatures could literally be spawned from nothing in mere minutes, every animal in the Elves’ employ that died was a life that could not be replaced nearly as easily.

This, of course, lead to another issue that the Elves were bound to face sooner or later, but that little issue would rear its head later on, once enough of the fauna in the service of The Great Tree had been focused on the main front or had died off.

As all of this was going down, Darksol was starting to move its bigger pieces into position. The Elves and their dumbass plant-people masters were overly focused on retaking the coastline, though it wasn’t like they had a navy that they could use to make that coastline worthwhile. Darksol, on the other hand, did have a navy, and made full use of it by patrolling along the retaken coastline and lobbing explosives and chemicals towards any knife-eared cunt that dared to get within their range.

However, the navy wasn’t one of those bigger pieces that were mentioned earlier. Oh, no. You see, the Elves had a fucking field day using their powerful bows to take down wave after wave of bat bombers, even though they couldn’t stop all of them. But, just like the Arbianans during the previous war, they were about to learn why technology was something you needed to invest heavily in. After all, all the wooden bows and fancy shmancy wooden siege weapons in the world could do nothing to something like an airship, let alone the first of the Tier 3 creations that Kain had finally brought to bear.

In modern war, aircraft rule the battlefield as kings of death, but when you could only use ground forces, then there was another king. A great man once said that artillery was the God of the battlefield, and the Elves were about to see what happens when you make the German Railway Cannon more mobile, give it a malign intelligence, shots that can erase entire fortresses in only a few good hits, and a master who doesn’t give the slightest flying fuck if he unleashes a literal zombie apocalypse on his foes if that means claiming absolute victory.